Bill Clinton tells Howard University grads to choose "open hands" over "closed fists"

Former President Clinton, once jokingly dubbed America's "first black president," delivered the commencement address at Howard University in Washington Saturday, urging the graduates of one of the nation's premiere historically black colleges to choose unity over division, "open hands" over "closed fists."

The graduates before him, Mr. Clinton said, would surely change the world, but first they must resolve "to share the future, to try to create a world of shared prosperity, where there is shared responsibility."

"It turns out that creative cooperation works better than constant conflict, and we forget that at our peril," Mr. Clinton said. "You can't share the future unless you share the responsibility for building it."

The former president underscored the imperative of cooperation by pointing to the example set by his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who accepted President Obama's offer to head the State Department despite an acrimonious 2008 primary battle that pitted the two Democratic heavyweights against one another.

"One of the things that heartened me," he said, was "when President Obama asked Hillary to be secretary of state, and she said yes, and they developed this, not just working relationship, but this amazing friendship which I just watched with great interest."

The crowd laughed, perhaps recalling the former president's own heated indictments of Mr. Obama during the primary campaign.

Mr. Clinton, chuckling to himself, added, "Aw come on, guys, get a life here. When you're as old as I am, you'll be able to laugh about this stuff."

"They fought this huge campaign, tooth and nail, trench campaign down to the end," Mr. Clinton recalled. And when the dust settled, Mr. Clinton said, Mr. Obama "was big enough to ask her to be secretary of state. She was big enough to take it. They trusted each other. And they both acknowledged that the differences in their positions were not that profound and there was a world out there that had to be healed."

In his introduction of Mr. Clinton, Douglas Wilder, formerly the governor of Virginia, winked at the possibility that Hillary Clinton might seek the presidency again in 2016, teasing the crowd with the prospect that "We might very well see Bill Clinton in the White House again."

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In his address, which clocked in under 28 minutes, Mr. Clinton said that unity is more important than ever before, reminding the graduates, "You are going out into a world that is the most interdependent world in history."

"You can see it not just in trade but travel and increasing diversity. Look how diverse America is," he said. "By 2050, there will be no majority in America. We'll just be one big group of people that will have to think of something to hold ourselves together."

That diversity and interdependence will yield enormous benefits, but it will also present challenges, Mr. Clinton said, referring to the April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon, where two bombs exploded at the finish-line area, killing three and injuring more than 260 more.

"All these open borders," Mr. Clinton said, "could lead to what happened at the Boston Marathon."

"Two boys come here looking for a college education, seem to be doing well," he said, "and this, or that, or the other thing goes wrong and they decide that the only way their lives can have meaning is to take some other people's lives away."

"They were not empowered as you are," Mr. Clinton told the graduates. "Perhaps we'll never know what tipped the scales for those young men who did that terrible thing at the Boston Marathon ... and all the others who found that all their cooperation options were closed."

"If you were going to avoid that, you have to be able to begin again," Mr. Clinton said.

And such perseverance is critically important, he said, because "you are living in a time that is changing so fast it is more likely than not that even if you start out fast, something will happen that you will find frustrating. You have to be able to begin again. And you have to be able to begin again without blaming somebody else in a way that isolates you from them."

"This whole thing comes down in the end to whether we think the future will be better if we face it with open hands or closed fists," Mr. Clinton said.

"You can't live in a world that is interdependent where the walls come down and borders look more like nets," he said. "You can't keep every bad thing out anywhere unless most people believe that what we have in common is more important than our interesting differences."